Tech Companies and Activists Unite to Protest the NSA

Get ready for another day of internet-wide activism. This is billed as “The Day We Fight Back,” with sites across the web joining a campaign to end mass surveillance programs from the National Security Agency.

The campaign was organized by public advocacy groups such as Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Fight for the Future, working alongside tech companies such as Reddit, Namecheap, and Tumblr. With the protest, activists hope to not only push public opinion even further against the NSA, but also defeat the FISA Improvements Act, a bill sponsored by California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein. Demand Progress executive director David Segal says that although the bill is touted as reform legislation, it would actually codify many of the surveillance practices that activists oppose — practices that have received added attention in recent months after ex-government contractor Edward Snowden began sharing NSA secrets with the press.

At least in spirit, today’s protest resembles a successful 2012 campaign to stop the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills, which critics argued were over-broad and would have allowed the government to censor the web. But it also honors the memory of Aaron Schwartz, the political activist and co-founder of both Demand Progress and Reddit, who took his life last year.

Although the campaign echoes the SOPA and PIPA campaign, which turned WIRED and countless other sites black two years ago, “The Day We Fight Back” isn’t calling for sites to go dark. Instead, campaigners are urging sites to post a banner that includes an embedded web app that people can use to call their senators and representatives.

In place of the Feinstein bill, activists hope to pass the USA Freedom Act, a bill sponsored by Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner in the House and Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy in the Senate. The measure “ends bulk metadata collection, increases transparency, and ends the backdoor loop hole that allows the NSA to target Americans while pretending to target foreigners,” Segal says.

Opinions Divided

Public opinion is divided on the NSA’s activities. Although most Americans want to see Snowden tried for his admitted role in leaking classified data, most also disapprove of the NSA surveillance program, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA Today last month. But today’s protest wants to shift things even further.

Demand Progress backed a campaign last summer to pass an amendment to a defense spending package that would have defunded the NSA’s metadata collection program. The measure lost by only 12 votes. Segal believes the new bill has more traction, and credits online activism with helping make the original vote so close. Approval of the NSA’s surveillance program has dropped from 48 percent in June 2013 to 40 percent in January 2014, while disapproval has risen from 47 percent to 53 percent, according to Pew.

Meanwhile, others are striving to keep surveillance in check with technical solutions. Tech companies have been accused of complacency in the NSA’s surveillance, but their businesses may suffer if they lose public trust. Microsoft and Google, for example, are beefing up their encryption systems in an effort to win back trust.

At the same time, the open source software community has responded by creating a range of new tools designed to make spying more difficult, including the encrypted email client Mailpile, the secure social networks TRSST and Twister, and a platform for building Bitcoin-style applications called Ethereum. Some are even combining open source with politics. Developers backed by California Republican Representative Darrell Issa built Madison, an open source platform designed to get the public more involved in crafting policy.

As more people turn to the web to try to change politics, one fear is that campaigners will wear out internet users with activism fatigue. But Segal says he doesn’t think people are getting burned out by calls to action. If anything, he says, the success of previous campaigns have energized and inspired more people to participate. “We think we have a great chance of winning,” he says.